Enemies List (thing)

Richard Nixon's original enemies list was actually quite short -- it had only 20 names on it. The existence of the list was revealed in a Senate Watergate hearing in June 1973, in which it was also revealed that the list was intended to make it easier for the administration to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." Methods proposed included Administration manipulation of "grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc."

This list probably seemed as insane within the White House as it later appeared outside, and it was expanded, perhaps in the hope that a longer list would look more like a study of Nixon's opposition, and less like a list that a six-year-old would scrawl of people who would not be invited to his birthday party.

The longer list was broken into sections, as indicated below (the fact that black congressmen were listed separately from white is taken from the original text). The job descriptions below were current in 1973. Any updates can be put in the enemies' individual writeups. Though the expanded list clearly got a lot more attention within the administration than the original one had, it is still pretty sloppy. Chuck Colson's office (which had maintained the list) got some names and job descriptions wrong, and listed one person who had died a couple of years earlier. I've noted these more glaring errors in (parentheses).

I am proud to have met and spent time with a number of these folk, including Galbraith, Chomsky, Bok, and Ramsey Clark.

Sources:New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1995Facts on File, Watergate and the White House, vol. 1, pages 96-97. as it appears at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~polisci/calvert/PolSci3103/watergate/enemy.htm
kudos to mat catastrophe, who pointed me to the Facts on File source.